Joanne Coleman

Name: Joanne Sekai Coleman

Gender: Female

Age: 17

Grade: 12

School: George Hunter High School

Hobbies and Interests: Poetry, stargazing, pop music and R&B, dancing, especially hip-hop, karaoke, progressive politics, history and psychology, video games, cooking, foodie culture, wine and spirits, partying, gossip

Appearance: Joanne is 5'6", with a milk chocolate skin tone due to her black heritage. She is overweight at 210 pounds, distributed throughout her body with a slight pear-ish shape putting more weight in her hips and thighs. She has thick arms and wide-set shoulders, naturally muscular as well as being fatty especially at the shoulders and upper arms.

Her face is oblong, with a long, gently sloping chin and a sizable forehead. She has soft cheeks with a naturally healthy glow. Her lips are thick and only off from her skin tone by a few shades. She has a large nose, bridge thick from side to side. Her brown eyes are stark and piercing, slightly angular. She plucks her eyebrows. She has clean facial skin and never gets acne, though she is prone to damaging dryness on her T-zone. Joanne keeps her curly black hair quite short, shaved into a tight and well maintained flat top that is clear of her forehead and ears and extends up an inch. Joanne knows her makeup and uses it for natural looks and sometimes more contoured, dramatic eye styles. She mixes and matches from drugstore brands and more expensive brand names.

Joanne has a soft spot for gender-neutral suits she owns when she can get away with wearing them, but otherwise, she mostly wears very casual clothing. She rather likes crop tops and shorts, usually mid-thigh, but inside school she of course follows school guidelines. She prefers wearing colorful graphic tees for her favorite bands or fashionable print tops. She doesn't have much of a taste for conservative wear. She also shies away from more rough punkish styles, preferring a few frills or otherwise feminine cuts and styles. She wears jewelry daily, her ears are pierced and she has plenty of rings and necklaces to swap out day-to-day. She usually likes plain golden colored accents in this regard. In terms of shoes, she likes flats or low heels, under two inches.

Joanne's voice is a bit exaggerated day-to-day. She naturally has a bassy voice, but she usually speaks in her upper register, with exaggerated excitement and elongated syllables.

On the day of the abduction, Joanne wore a bright red tank top and neatly pressed black denim jeans. She wore white strappy sandals with one inch light colored wooden heels. She wore two golden rings, one on her left pinkie finger and one on her left index finger, and she had a thin generic silvery link necklace. She wore full natural makeup including foundation and concealer to smooth out her skin, contouring, bronzer to enhance her skin tone, a light blush, mascara, false eyelashes and lipgloss to keep her lips shiny and moisturized.

Biography: Joanne Sekai was born in Chattanooga on May 15, 2001, to Roberts Coleman and Aaliyah Danai Jackson, a youthful middle class couple supported by Roberts' job as a software developer. Roberts and Aaliyah first met four years prior at a work party in a sports bar, with Aaliyah being the +1 to her cousin Mason, Roberts' coworker. Aaliyah had admired Roberts' respectfulness and decisiveness, with him taking charge but giving her space to breath and make her own decisions. Meanwhile, Roberts was attracted to how Aaliyah laughed all the time, with her laugh lightening up the atmosphere and making hard times easier for him.

Aaliyah went from clinic to clinic working as a dental assistant while Roberts managed a database development team for a local startup. Following the dotcom boom, Roberts' income rose dramatically, even as he switched from being a manager to being a consultant for the startup. From that break onward, the family has since always been well-off. They owned a home south of Frazier's Glen with good valuation and a fully paid down mortgage, and were able to invest in a summer apartment in Florida. In addition, due to Roberts' newly-found wealth and the stability of his job, it was decided with some reluctance on Aaliyah's part that she would become a stay-at-home mom. Joanne has two younger twin brothers, Tanka and Rudo, born when she was in the sixth grade.

Joanne was rambunctious as a toddler and young child, inquisitive but overly talkative and rash. She hit a number of her milestones early, including speaking and reading at advanced ages. When she was in kindergarten, her teacher recommended she skip a grade due to her testing proving she could handle advanced material for her age. Her parents, as well as Joanne herself, were quite proud when she skipped to second grade at the end of the school year. She fit in fairly well with the older kids, and was boisterous and friendly.

In her youth, her hobbies included chatting with others and studying science and history books, the latter being a hobby she kept to herself, and she often played down her own intelligence, even at a young age. She felt awkward showing off, and preferred a quiet appreciation of her intellect. With her friends in school, she preferred going along with their playtime and gossiping instead of trying to intrude with her own intellectual tendencies.

One thing she enjoyed doing as a little girl was studying space. Even though she was too young to intuitively grasp what was really involved, she was awed by what she did understand. All her favorite books were kids' astronomy books. For her sixth birthday, her parents bought her a telescope set, a proper adult set that they helped her use, bringing her out deep into the forests surrounding Chattanooga so she could use it. She spent many memorable nights filling out notebooks with her observations of the night sky while her parents watched her. To this day, she keeps these notebooks.

Joanne was quite the loyal girl and she met many of her current friends in elementary school, friends she has dutifully stuck by to this day. She preferred to cling firmly to people if they didn't give her a reason to dislike them, and the friends she lost in elementary school she often took very hard, missing them dearly or turning against them with childish fury to protect her own feelings. She was loud at school as she came more out of her shell. The years passed and she grew more comfortable with herself and her own budding beliefs. She turned out to be easily provoked and offended. She had many childish grudges, usually forgiven and forgotten only with difficulty.

With some of her close friends, and her father while at home, she developed the habit of playing video games to break the ice and make conversations easier and more enjoyable. Joanne liked games with a social aspect, where progress could be compared and made cooperative or competitive. Joanne would always been an emotive player, quite temperamental whether she won or lost and heartily cheering on friends from the sidelines. Her favorite titles in elementary school included the Mario Party series, Super Smash Brothers, and Neopets.

Joanne nowadays looks fondly on her elementary school days as the simplest and happiest time of her life: marked by cartoons, games with friends, and none of the issues that would beset her later in life. She was a big fan of the radio like her mom was, and because the two often ran pop radio stations- to Roberts' bemusement- Joanne's nostalgic childhood songs are almost all Top 40 hits, titles like "Umbrella" and "Evacuate the Dancefloor". Her favorite artists from then that she still keeps in rotation to this day included P!nk, Carrie Underwood, Jordin Sparks, and Rihanna. She and her mom would sing these songs around, sometimes with Joanne's friends.

When Joanne entered middle school, she noticed that her tastes were broadening, and puberty was creeping up on her. Her sense of social justice in general developed, and she became increasingly sensitive to those who she deemed crass and offensive. Joanne would have some dramatic confrontations with bullies and friendships turned sour anyways, often as the aggressor due to her easily violated sense of justice.

Physically, her body image was initially negatively impacted. Aaliyah was quite the cook and always kept the dinner table overflowing, even when she had five mouths to feed after her second pregnancy. She would also let Joanne assist and learn how to cook with her, food being a very happy common bond they both shared. Thus, Joanne was always quite the eater. Joanne and Aaliyah regularly went out, sometimes taking Roberts and the boys, to try any sort of new restaurant in the area. Joanne is not picky and likes anything from fast food to exotic Asian cuisine to magazine-recommended fusion restaurants. This became a problem when puberty changed her metabolism and she began to fatten, and she got some negative comments for it, enough to the point that it began to bother her. For a trimester in eighth grade, her normally perfect grades slipped. She became crankier and more disaffected from friends. Eventually, the positive intervention and encouragement from her close friend Tanisha Abbey turned Joanne's mood around, and Joanne began to develop pride in her growing body and self-autonomy to enjoy food as she felt fit, but Joanne would never forget that severe dip in her overall mood that had seemed to last forever to her.

Joanne's middle school years were overall productive. She got over her immature tastes in wasting large amounts of time on cartoons and began pursuing more serious academic affairs and hobbies on the side. She found a precocious sense of responsibility nurtured by having baby brothers, she wanted to set a good example for both of them. In school she kept her grades up and enjoyed the development of her academic brain, bringing challenge to herself if she couldn't find it in the class. She quietly signed up for local quiz competitions, relishing the challenge even if she lost. But she remained shy about showing off, even dropping out of a geography trivia contest once when she thought a friend was going to join. Sometimes losing did seem to stick, and she always felt it took her longer to recover from defeat than other kids her age. She could spend entire days brooding and sullen, struggling to be productive. When her parents noticed after she'd bombed a quiz they brought her to a therapist, who noted Joanne had a proneness to depression and melancholy. He recommended cognitive therapy, which she attended weekly with some positive results.

Her favorite classes emerged as history and English, where she found she had a way with words and enjoyed drafting essays and arguing points, especially as she started to develop a sense of racial identity that she could be proud of. Her studies were liberal in nature; she sometimes found the curriculum insufficient and did her own supplementary research, inclusive of more historically critical perspectives such as that of Howard Zinn. Her father was an activist and volunteered in the NAACP to do school engagement. Joanne tried this herself for a time, distributing pamphlets unofficially in school. This upped her tendency for argumentativeness. She was often verbally unfriendly towards those she perceived as racist or sexist, though she often downplayed the intellectual vigor of her arguments; she felt the full spectrum of her budding historical knowledge was unneeded and unwanted. She developed a reputation by then of being an unabashed activist, and was a polarizing type as a result. Her friends encouraged her and a positive attitude existed in her social groups in their attempts to be fighters on behalf of progressive justice.

In the eighth grade, she was introduced to dance by several friends who had been into it for a while longer. She would watch occasionally, only mildly interested, but eventually, a combination of idle curiosity and friendly peer pressure caused her to pick up on it, leading her to attend a few hip-hop classes. While the workout was tough and she wasn't so good, she found she rather enjoyed the casual, positive, energetic social scene in a dance studio, and she started to make it a regular part of her schedule. She regularly gossiped with her dance studio friends and was often the wallet treating them to after-class snacks. She found improvement as a dancer fun, in opposition to her dislike of most forms of P.E. outside of dance. Dance itself became a fun use of her free time, a way for her to express herself even if she was sometimes only barely able to keep up. She could enjoy routines with her favorite singers of the time, like Kesha and Ariana Grande. She watches YouTube videos of routines regularly, and likes to help her better friends in their dance endeavors as a backup, dedicated to practice to make up for her lack of grace.

She graduated to George Hunter, and has been there all four years. The influence of her friends had her making an appearance in the party scene from her freshman year onward. She quickly embraced the scene. Her friendliness and boisterous charm led her to take on elements of the flamboyance and intensity of older party goers and make it her own. In a way, it was only ever an aspect of herself, one she was never entirely comfortable with. She wanted to fit in and to be a good friend, so she made herself a fixture in many social groups, passed on gossip as she was allowed because it made things interesting and kept people interested in her. She would learn a lot more about many of her friends than she bargained for, and though always strongly loyal, she found she was also judgmental and sometimes her progressive nature turned toxic in her friendships. She remained loudly set against people who were obviously obnoxious and easy to hate for the beliefs she considered backwards and toxic, and she was occasionally dramatic in parties themselves, getting into arguments with party goers.

Parties introduced her to more music. She became known for her proudly stated love of Meghan 'M-Train' Trainor, Lorde, and Alessia Cara, declaring their lyricism to be deep. She engaged in a few relationships, but they were only ever casual and chaste. She didn't quite have the interest in going any further due to uncertainty about the long term. Besides this, for the most part, her friendships were plentiful, whether made at parties or outside of them. She was quite chatty and had strong opinions. However, she was often perceived as shallow, as she remained hesitant to delve into her intellectual and wide-read perspectives. She has studied many writings of figures of fourth wave feminism, finding excitement in the inclusive nature of the movement, but she trusts few friends with her full set of opinions on life and the world. For the rest, it's more casual gossip, bashing teachers, or getting on the dance floor.

One of the first parties she attended was at a karaoke bar. After a friend pulled her onto the stage and forced her to sing with her, Joanne discovered her love for singing. When she sings, she tends to place more focus on volume rather than staying on-key, thus preventing her from joining choir. This does not bring her much shame however, and she still finds great joy in singing along to blaring music, whether on the dance floor or the stage. Like dance, she finds it to be a great outlet for energy, and enjoying the loud, raucous atmosphere of karaoke bars. Up to now, she makes it a point to go with her friends to a karaoke bar once a week so she can sing the latest hits.

In school, she maintained her strong GPA, taking AP classes in English and history to earn over 4.0 weighted. She has written essays, usually relevant to her academic interests such as evaluations of modern systemic racism, for scholarships and has won thousands of dollars in free tuition. Her interests had teachers encouraging her to be more active in her community and to volunteer. When she has free time, she does so, and she volunteered politically during the 2016 presidential elections. She has plenty of social media links to online platforms for progressivism and change. She works part-time retail during summers and often uses the money solely on new clothes and donating to her pet causes like neighborhood outreach, local churches in disadvantaged neighborhoods, and startup efforts for funding low income scholarships. She often has dollars to spare on Tumblr Kickstarters with stories that tug her heartstrings as well. She has low expenditures for her own hobbies; for example, she often plays new multiplayer video games only when friends buy them.

Gaming has started becoming less of an interest for her, as parties bring her more of the social interaction with friends that she craves. She still turns to them to unwind, however, when she either wishes to be alone but doesn't want to spend much time with her thoughts, or when there's no party being held nearby but she still wants an outlet for her energy. Also, gaming is one of the main interests she and her brothers bond over, and she typically indulges their requests to play with them after they have finished their homework.

Her growing interest in progressive identity politics also sobered her to the world. She has grown more polarized and argumentative, both internally and occasionally externally, against those with a differing viewpoint, usually shutting out such people. She became more generally upset with the world at large, a sort of deep melancholy settling in her with time due to a perception of helplessness to affect change as an individual, especially with the political realignments that followed 2016. She has settled more into her own groove, often searching for isolation to drop her cheerful and flamboyant behavior, stargazing alone when she takes the family car out on weekend nights. She has taken to writing poetry, often dour in tone, only for herself.

At parties, she finds she has started reaching for the alcohol, sometimes to relax. She started drinking in the tenth grade. At first, it was merely to be part of the crowd, but increasingly she has taken to it of her own volition. She drinks sometimes to keep herself from feeling isolated and alone in the middle of a party. She has developed a genuine affection for and intellectual curiosity in fine alcohols and spirits, though she uses the cheap stuff for getting tipsy and happy or even more drunk. She has also expressed interest in wine tastings and has started collecting catalogs and dreaming of having a wine cellar should she ever make it into a happier future. Her mother approves, being a wine connoisseur herself, and Joanne's drinking is one of several points of contention her parents started to argue more and more about when their marriage started to unravel. Aaliyah feels Joanne's drinking, in moderation, helps them bond over wine tastings and education at home; Roberts is resentful of this and is more concerned about Joanne drinking in general. Neither parent knows Joanne drinks often at parties. While Aaliyah knows that Joanne drinks without her supervision, she is under the impression that it's merely social drinking, and tolerates it as drinking is a shared interest. Joanne keeps her mouth shut and has friends help her by offering her places to stay so she doesn't come home inebriated, under the guise of late night sleepovers. As a result, neither Robert nor Aaliyah has seen her drunk, something she intends to keep hidden.

Joanne tried her hardest to stay happy around her close friends, as they become increasingly the few people she trusts and feels safe and secure around. Joanne is typically successful, and is very good at staying in that party girl mode externally, even if she is internally distracted. Sometimes, even when out with her mom eating her favorite foods, Joanne can feel like this. She's disturbed by her mental state but is unsure of how to deal with it, so she simply indulges it with poetry and weekend nights spent alone, and otherwise ignores it as her coping mechanism. She kept up her projections for her family's sake, especially her younger brothers, as she felt a profound responsibility for their upbringing and has been trying to guide them into being what she believes to be better, inculcating them with feminist and progressive beliefs, with good success as both her brothers look up wholeheartedly to their big sister.

Joanne started settling on a possible future in her junior year. Inspired by a psychology class and her own personal studies, she wanted to try and make a difference by becoming a psychologist or sociology researcher and possibly getting into public policy. She has realigned her classes to this effect, but her grades have stalled and slipped from their heights in her sophomore year due to her infrequent episodes of melancholy robbing her of her will to work. She has explained away that slipping of grades into B's and C's to friends in the know as her disinterest in future higher education, when that is the furthest thing from the truth. She has successfully shaped the narrative through her friends and self-started gossip, such that the general external perception of others is that Joanne has lost her interest in academics in favor of her party life. While originally, Joanne would party once or twice weekly, she soon started going out three or four times a week, desperate for an escape from her toxic home life.

About halfway through Joanne's junior year, Aaliyah accused Roberts of carrying on an affair. Roberts retaliated by claiming Aaliyah had been skimming money from their shared accounts for years under false pretenses. No solid evidence exists for either possibility, but the once stable marriage began to slowly degrade as the two became passive-aggressive, argued, and failed attempts at marriage counseling. Aaliyah was prone to hysterics, while Roberts would sometimes storm out of the house for days. The two refused to divorce, even as it was increasingly clear the two had irreconcilable differences. Both parents began to compete for the affection of their children, unwittingly shaming Joanne and her younger brothers on and off with long talks and emotional bribery. Both parents are distracted with their battling the other, and thus the home is often in a state of mismanagement. It falls to Joanne to keep her brothers working on their homework, and she has been able to convince her mom sometimes to buy hard liquor for their shared usage.

Joanne does not know where her loyalties lie, and she continues to attend to both parents even as they pester her about the other. She has become actively protective of her little brothers, trying to distract them and shield them from the aftereffects of their parents' slow falling out, bringing them out and accompanying them to extracurricular activities. She has also become guilty, unsure about her role in the problem: doubting her passiveness, her selfishness in continuing to party and abandon her younger brothers at home sometimes. These thoughts in particular haunt her more and more distinctly as of late, and she drinks more, dipping into the funds she'd formerly earmarked for her small donations to charities, using them for paying older kids to buy liquor for her private consumption.

Joanne thus lives two lives, one wholly external and one internal. She is a party girl with a lovably strong and unapologetic disposition, fanatically devoted to her causes and her Tumblr blog, a loud belter during karaoke sessions with friends and a dispenser of plenty of advice and positivity. These behaviors still make her happy, at least in the moment, but less strongly as of late, and increasingly in her day-to-day life, the confusion and depression lurk and linger in her ordinary thoughts. Her internal melancholy has caused her to lately become more dedicated to her dancing in the school club and in her studio, looking for a constructive outlet for her pent up energy, though her physique remains an issue. Comfort eating, sometimes with her mother joining in and encouraging it due to her own marital woes, has caused Joanne's weight to balloon within the past two years. Aaliyah actively resists Roberts' belief that Joanne needs to diet. Joanne herself is conflicted, as with almost anything involving her parents, she sees both sides, further complicated by her depression poisoning her body image into ambivalence.

Joanne, in the winter of 2017, began to experiment with certain harder prescription drugs, infrequently. A number of the parties she had the reputation to get into had unsavory elements in attendance, and Joanne, in a dour mood, would feel helpless enough at one to blow her alcohol budget on pills. She has tried codeine in the form of Lean and Xanax; in both cases, she was disturbed by the experience, but experiences some natural gravitation to further experimentation in her down moments that she now actively has to resist. She is far from physiologically addicted, but she recognizes she is perhaps in a mentally dangerous place that she continues to hide and keep to herself.

By herself, Joanne has plenty to meditate on in the time she spends alone, under the stars or trying to shut out her parents arguing at home with music. She worries about her over-reliance on drinking to stay positive and socially lubricated and is scared for her future, but is unsure who to reach out to, as she worries alerting her therapist will cause a divorce to occur. She keeps seeing her therapist, but she often obscures information. Though her therapist is at times suspicious, she does a fairly good job of keeping the whole picture obscured, especially as her parents also keep their domestic disturbances quiet, leaving the therapist with an incomplete picture of Joanne's home life. Her slipping grades have become a familial concern. Joanne lies and blames anxiety over graduation, which has led to her therapy sessions generally being inadequate for her situation and Joanne wearing a mask through them. She does not feel she can trust her parents, and does not want to bother them during this difficult time in their own lives. Her parents, for their part, suspect that her partying has something to do with her grades, and they believe that parties are how she deals with her anxiety. Her grades have become yet another topic the two argue over. While the two have addressed the issue with Joanne, they are more often distracted with blaming each other for not supervising Joanne and her brothers enough.

She does not want to burden her friends, and just tries to be the best friend she can be to them, being their favorite party girl. Her friends believe she will attend the local Chattanooga State Community College, which was, in years prior, her cover story to downplay her ambitions and successful scholarship search for higher education: mostly private colleges like Wesleyan and Bennett where she has flexible options in financing and has already applied. Her ambitions generally remain, but her energy is sapped by her battling with depression and her environment. Even if she's accepted to college, she's considering taking a gap year to volunteer, or travel, and clear her head, but her parents arguing over what she should do upon graduation has made navigating that issue tricky as well.

Advantages: Joanne is naturally quite smart and quick to the draw with her wits as well, which is always useful in any island situation for proper survival planning. Furthermore, she is very deceptive. She can act her way through confrontations fairly well and people who know her at all are likely inclined to assume she is dumber and poses less of a threat than she actually might.

Disadvantages: Her tendencies towards a depressive mentality could severely harm her survival chances and ability to act proactively in the long run. She is loud and has strong moral opinions and loyalties, often oriented against peers, and she could thus be easily lured into a losing situation by her mentality. She is overweight and relatively out of shape despite some physical conditioning, so she will have less energy and endure more stress physically than a comparable peer.

Designated Number: Female student No. 052

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Designated Weapon: George Hunter High School mascot costume

Conclusion: Welp, doesn't get any more gender-neutral than THAT, does it? Go Horned Owls! - Matt Richards

'The above biography is as written by Maraoone. No edits or alterations to the author's original work have been made.'

Evaluations
Handled by: Cicada, Maraoone

Kills: None

Killed By: Blaise d'Aramitz

Collected Weapons: George Hunter High School mascot costume (assigned weapon, to Lori Martin)

Allies: Billy Trevino, Mackenzie Baker, Kyle Harrison

Enemies: Blaise d'Aramitz

Mid-game Evaluation: 

Post-Game Evaluation: 

Memorable Quotes:

Threads
Below is a list of threads containing Joanne, in chronological order.

The Past: V7 Pregame: V7:
 * I'm alright. I'm just fine. And you're a tool, so.
 * Make A New Cult Every Day
 * You did not break me. I'm still fighting for peace.
 * Desperate Times
 * Heavy is the Head That Wears the Crown
 * Dooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo You Have The Time... To Listen To Me Whine?
 * i'm so 3008
 * hold on to this lullaby
 * Don't Stray Off the Path
 * D.R.E.A.M
 * I'm Not That Nice, I'm Mean and I'm Evil
 * we keep these promises, write it in a letter
 * Sleep Is The Cousin Of Death

Your Thoughts
''Whether you were a fellow handler in SOTF or just an avid reader of the site, we'd like to know what you thought about Joanne Coleman. What did you like, or dislike, about the character? Let us know here!''
 * Joanne was one of Cicada's kids in Pregame, which is probably enough on its own to suggest that she has a super developed and distinct voice. She lands somewhere in the middle of her original handler's cast, never quite as difficult to parse as Beryl, but at the same time lacking some of the casual breeziness (and sleaziness) of Demetri. Generally, Joanne's Pregame does a good job of establishing her, and she has some very potent aspects of her concept that are explored well, chief among them that she downplays her own considerable intelligence and that her family situation is a tangled nightmare mess.

I would say that the two Pregame sequences that most encapsulate Joanne for me are her introductory one-shot and her falling-out with Matthew. The one-shot is probably Joanne at her most difficult, but it uses that difficulty to bring the reader along on the emotional journey as she tries to shield her siblings and herself from her parents' unending fighting. It's pretty grim, painful stuff, especially if you've ducked domestic conflict yourself, and it uses the length to sell the grueling, continuous nature of the struggle. Her spat with Matthew, meanwhile, is one of the best cases I've ever seen of two characters both kind of having a point and both caring for each other and yet still managing to mess up and spiral past the point of no return. It's totally vital reading for Matthew, but I'll talk about that when I get to him. From Joanne's side, she reacts to his ill-advised and insensitive prying with escalation and anger, revealing a drive to deal with her problems privately, on her own, and delineating a clear wall beyond which even friends may not pass.

In-game, I'm actually shocked to realize as I review that Joanne has only two interactive threads, one of them her death. She changes hands between Pregame and the island, landing in the capable care of Maraoone, who among other things is slick enough to make her a satisfying and fascinating read despite the core of her story lying entirely in one rather tangled and periodically muddled thread. That sells her a bit short, however; the thread is long and Joanne is one of the more active figure throughout. Moreover, her four one-shots each do a lot of work. Cicada is a tough act to follow because her characters often work as much on a stylistic and voice level as on a character and plot one, but Mara admirably takes up this mantle while avoiding the obvious pitfall of trying to replicate the exact same voice as Joanne's Pregame incarnation. Each of these one-shots lets the new voice come to the fore, playing with meta narrative traits in a knowing and clever way.

My favorite of them all is this one, which uses nested spoilers in a fashion much more clever and vital than a lot of what we've seen, hiding aspects of the scene and making the reader participate in the unveiling. In fact, if I have one gripe here, it's this: I think this could've, and quite possibly should've, been Joanne's death scene. It taps into one of SOTF's most infamous, long-standing clichés: a character falling to their doom out of nowhere. The thing is, though, in this case Joanne was not rolled when the thread went down, and the whole thing was so wonderfully executed that I was just left going, dang, am I going to love a rock death? And then, when she did get rolled a few days after the thread dropped, I was bummed but also pretty hyped.

But Joanne does not plummet to her demise. Instead, she recovers and makes her way to her second interactive scene, where an attempt to disarm Blaise goes awry and costs her her life. As a scene, I feel it's kind of a mixed bag but part of this may be that both characters are coming off story-defining, unconventional highlights (Joanne with the fall, and Blaise with the monkey target practice post that opens the thread and is really, really excellent), and by comparison the kill/death proceeds pretty normally for V7 and spends a few cycles too many trying to sell Blaise's sneakiness and casual stance towards violence, both traits more successfully built up elsewhere. At the same time, a lot of Joanne's voice and presence is comparatively muted here. It's a good thing, then, that her actual death post just does its own wild, meta thing, serving as a rumination on incompleteness and a moment of self-critique. It doesn't quite hit the incredible highs of the fall for me, but it takes a real risk and it pans out well for the most part.

Joanne's a brief character, I guess, but I still don't even quite believe it. She's always interesting, and while she does her very best work solo, she still holds her own when interacting with others. If you're looking at characters who play with convention, she's definitely worth some attention, and not just her death either. - MurderWeasel